Jennifer Smout’s take on the administration of the soon to be operationalised Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Fund (Ramaphosa adviser’s grip over Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Fund, Daily Maverick 12 March 2020), is subjective, slanted and regrettably, personalised. On behalf of the Interim Steering Committee on Gender Based Violence and Femicide, we hereby exercise our right to respond as noted below:

DM: South Africa has an epidemic of gender-based violence. One positive step was the announcement of a Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Fund to increase support to survivors. However, there are already major concerns before the initiative is even ready to leave the starting blocks.

RESPONSE: The decision to create a Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Fund emerged out of the GBVF Summit that was held in November 2018. The rationale for this Fund being to ensure sustainable response to ending GBVF through multisectoral efforts from government, private sector, development funders, philanthropists, etc. Also, it was to ensure equitable distribution of resources to deserving civil society organisations by disrupting the monopoly to such funding by limited participation of established and well-resourced NGOs and individual consultants. Furthermore this Fund was envisioned to foster collaboration and coordination of efforts thus bringing an end to these competitive and futile interventions that have plagued the response to GBV. This need for a GBVF Fund was further amplified during the World Economic Forum held in Cape Town simultaneously with the protests against the murder of UCT student, Uyinene Mrwetyana.

DM: At a special joint sitting of Parliament in September 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a meeting with representatives of the private sector to discuss the establishment of a Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Fund (GBVF) to increase support to survivors. Since that joint sitting, neither the Presidency nor the president has made any further statements about the fund, and tender documents for managing it have not been published.

RESPONSE: Prior to this, responding to the Summit call for a GBVF Fund, the Interim Steering Committee (ISC) on GBVF, under the co-chairmanship of Advocate Brenda Madumise-Pajibo and Dr Olive Shisana, convened workshops on the development of the National Strategic Plan (NSP) where delegates representing GBV stakeholders deliberated and provided input towards the vision of the Fund. Subsequently, the GBVF Fund was included in the draft NSP submitted to Cabinet at the end of October 2019 and remains a key feature in the final approved strategy as announced on 11 March 2020.

DM: Yet, in February 2019, SABCOHA – the South African Business Coalition on Health and Aids – accepted five electric BMWs from the German government as managing agents for the GBVF Fund. Don’t worry if you have never heard of SABCOHA – many people working in the GBV space hadn’t either.

RESPONSE: In the meantime, after submitting the NSP to Cabinet and before its approval (a period of five months), the ISC developed an Emergency Response Plan (ERAP) which was announced by the President with a commitment of R1.6-billion to implement it. During this period, a number of private sector organisations and development partners wanted to make contributions towards the realisation of plans to end GBV, including, but not limited to, the donation of five (5) BMW electrical cars that were available for transfer within a specific period of time. Since the ISC is not a legal entity, it could not receive donations of whatever nature in its own name as it is Interim and has no intention of permanency. It is important to note that the Interim Steering Committee does not fit the legal definition of either a statutory body or a council. And importantly, none of its members serve full time or are remunerated. This necessitated the need for an interim measure to facilitate the handover of the vehicles and temporary management thereof until a permanent arrangement is in place to take over these assets.

The relationship with SABCOHA is regulated by a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Ministry of Women, Youth & Persons with Disabilities on behalf of the ISC which would then eventually be replaced by a permanent GBV Council as articulated in the NSP. At the moment, a plan is being considered by the ISC (as SABCOHA is simply holding the cars on behalf of ISC), to avail these cars to deserving civil society organisations working on the prevention of GBV and Femicide.

DM: With the process for appointing the administrators of the fund already murky, the management of billions of rand in future investment aimed at addressing gender-based violence may be in doubt.

RESPONSE: This statement is simply untrue and unfounded.

DM: The not-so-interim Interim Steering Committee on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide

Before we go any further, it’s necessary to understand a bit about the Interim Steering Committee on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide (ISC).

The ISC has been operating since the GBV Summit in November 2018. It is made up of government, civil society, and donor representatives with the inclusivity of civil society, which was a requirement of the declaration and the GBV Summit. The Commission for Gender Equality is also on the structure for monitoring purposes – more on that later.

The ISC has two co-chairs who lead the structure: advocate Brenda Madumise-Pajibo (Total Shut Down/The Wise Collective) represents civil society, and Professor Olive Shisana (presidential special adviser on social policy) represents the government.

As a special adviser to the president, it is strange that Shisana was selected to lead this grouping on behalf of the state. The Dispensation for the Appointment and Remuneration of Special Advisers (Considerations in terms of Section 12 A of the Public Service Act) states:

“the serving of special advisors on statutory bodies or councils (or similar bodies) for which the Executive Authority is individually or collectively accountable, would be inappropriate, since it could give rise to a direct or indirect conflict of interest or advice which could be biased or perceived to be biased.”

RESPONSE: Prior to the Summit, which marks the beginning of the formation of the ISC – this group was responsible for planning of the Summit – civil society had made it abundantly clear that it did not want leadership from the Ministry of Women at the time. In fact, the Summit was led by the Department of Justice as such those meetings were co-chaired by Dr Olive Shisana (facilitating on behalf of Office of the President) and Advocate Praise Khambula (representing Department of Justice). Post the Summit, with clear instruction from the declaration, a co-chair from civil society was agreed upon by civil society stakeholders and while government was awaiting appointment of a new administration Dr Shisana held the fort. Upon appointment of a new administration, Dr Shisana announced to the ISC and made it clear that she will no longer co-chair the ISC and that the new Minister once settled in her role at WYPD would soon assume the co-chairmanship of the ISC.

DM: The declaration gives the ISC two tasks – one, establish a permanent multi-sectoral body to coordinate efforts to end and prevent GBV; and two, implement actions in the declaration as agreed on by the ISC. According to the declaration, the ISC should have concluded its work by October 2019.

RESPONSE: The ISC completed and submitted a draft NSP to Cabinet that included the establishment of a Council and the GBVF Fund.

DM: In fact, it submitted a draft national strategic plan (NSP) on the GBVF and a GBVF co-ordinating structure model to Cabinet in December 2019, but it was not approved. Since the consultations around the draft NSP in mid-2019, no updated version has been published, and nor has information about the coordinating structure it proposed. Even Parliament’s joint efforts to discuss the plan and council in 2019 were stymied when the ISC arrived but did not bring proper documentation – including the NSP.

RESPONSE: The NSP was submitted end of October 2019, the Cabinet process scheduled it to December 2019; at this point, the NSP belonged to government thus the ISC ceased to be the custodians of a document that was no longer in its control.

It is therefore untrue that the ISC failed to bring proper documentation to Parliament. For the record, on this appearance before the portfolio committee, it was the Ministry of WYPD that was in attendance, the following documents were distributed beforehand: (1) Full ERAP plan and its corresponding Monitoring and Evaluation framework (2) Background information on ISC, and constitution and member profiles. A full presentation on the NSP was prepared by Department of WYPD to present on that day but unfortunately the meeting adjourned on the basis of the committee claiming that they were not furnished with the NSP. In addition, they wanted a report on the spending to date of the R1.6-billion of which ISC would not have been able to do as the resources were sitting with respective government departments and not disbursed to the ISC. Had the meeting proceeded, members would have been taken through the NSP and advised by the Department of WYPD on when the final document would be available to them.

DM: They are not the only ones struggling to do their legislated oversight duty. The Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) reported in Parliament on 3 March that it faced challenges in accessing information from the ISC because of hostility from the leadership and the refusal of ISC members and roleplayers to participate in CGE interviews“for fear of retribution from members of the ISC”. The research team reported their challenges to the CEO of the CGE, who wrote several letters to the leadership of the ISC to resolve the issues, but to no avail. The commission also wrote to the Director-General in the Presidency, Dr Cassius Lubisi, to express its frustration. It further reported:

“The issues that arose during this study [on the ISC] (especially the obstructions and lack of cooperation from the Members and the leadership of the Interim Steering Committee on GBV) were of such a serious nature that they boarded [sic] on the obstruction of the work of a Chapter 9 institution.”

An interim steering committee that is neither interim, nor transparent in its operations. Right now we’re all on the same page about the ISC, let’s get back to the GBVF Fund.

RESPONSE: The Commission on Gender Equality (CGE) is a member of the ISC; its CEO is invited to all the meetings but in over a year has only attended once. Instead, several, and different each time, CGE staff have attended meetings from time to time including throughout the NSP consultation process.

With regards to the request for research, a staff member of CGE presented the request for CGE to conduct research on the proposed model structure. This request was received after an extensive multi-stakeholder workshop on the model structure was conducted and thus seemed to seek to undermine that public input. CGE staff were therefore requested to submit the proposed research methodology to afford the ISC the opportunity to understand the public inputs of civil society voices already garnered on the proposed model structure.

The ISC’s minutes are available for inspection and GCIS has issued statements following key decisions from ISC meetings at various, these are also available to be consulted.

DM: The GBVF Fund

Although the president has not said more about the GBVF Fund, Shisana has. At an event hosted by the Irish Embassy and the Southern African Liaison Office on 17 February 2020, Shisana encouraged all foreign donors in the room (and there were many) to direct all of their funding on GBV into the GBVF Fund so that, in her words, “like with HIV we can all fund a single country plan”.

A single fund for a single plan – the NSP – which nobody in the public has seen since the draft version at consultations. Should all foreign donors follow Shisana’s call and do so, the fund could grow to be quite large indeed.

RESPONSE: As of today, five days after the approval of the NSP, there’s zero cash in the GBVF Fund. Thus this statement is alarmist at best, and not factual.

DM: Back to SABCOHA –according to its website (last updated in 2014) SABCOHA is a member-based non-profit organisation established in 2001 and established by the private sector to facilitate and coordinate a private sector response to HIV/Aids. It was formally registered as an NPO in 2004, and in 2012 expanded to focus on health more broadly in addition to HIV/Aids. Its slogan is “healthy workplaces shaping healthy communities”. Its board (at least in 2014) was led by Dr Lesego Rametsi of Absa Group, with board members from De Beers, African Rainbow Minerals, Aveng, the Chamber of Mines, Life Occupational Health, the ILO Southern Africa, and South African Breweries.

SABCOHA hasn’t produced an annual report since 2014, though media reports suggest that its work has continued to focus on HIV/Aids, in particular in the mining sector working with the Chamber of Mines and EOH on screening for HIV/Aids (2017), implementing an HIV prevention programme on behalf of the Aids Foundation of South Africa (2019), and partnering with the Department of Health (2019) to distribute condoms to taverns.

While it may have experience in managing private sector funds to address HIV, its website doesn’t speak to any experience in the GBV sector. However, SABCOHA accepted five electric BMWs in February on behalf of the ISC, which implies it had already been selected to manage the GBVF Fund. Dr Rametsi received the BMWs on SABCOHA’s behalf.

I wrote to SABCOHA to ask simple questions – how did they hear about the fund, what was the tender process for being awarded the right to administer the fund, have they received any donations and how will SABCOHA be reporting on the income and expenditure to the public?

Siyabonga Jikwana, newly appointed CEO of SABCOHA, avoided answering these, responding instead that SABCOHA “was identified as a coordinator of the private sector response in partnership with government and civil society” and that they “boast a unique strategic position of being able to coordinate all sectors of our economy by having direct access to industries at all levels”.

Despite more than one request from me to respond to the actual questions I’d asked, Jikwana did not oblige.

RESPONSE: Clearly there were a lot of assumptions and inaccurate insinuations made from just SABCOHA receiving the BMWs on behalf of the ISC, for reasons already clarified above.

DM: Rubber stamps and rushed decisions

How and when SABCOHA was chosen to administer the fund, and by whom, is a question that bears considering, especially since the ISC hasn’t put out any public information on any tender process.

RESPONSE: SABCOHA has not been appointed to manage the GBVF Fund, rather they have offered to mobilise private sector financial resources for the eradication of GBVF. The actual establishment of the Fund will be the decision of the permanent Council which is pending all the necessary government processes including, but not limited to, legislation.

DM: But that might be because the larger body didn’t make the decision at all. An email thread among minutes from the ISC that were forwarded to me points to Shisana as the sole decision-maker.

RESPONSE: Untrue. In particular, in addition to discussions at the meeting, all civil society representatives were given additional time to ventilate the proposal, including a group WhatsApp for safe space to discuss and recommend a way forward. This record can be made available.

In fact, in quoting from the email correspondence relating to the appointment of the South African Business Coalition on Health and Aids (SABCOHA), your correspondent somewhat disingenuously omits to mention the list of stakeholders from whom inputs were solicited in the name emails; among them the international development agencies (including UN Women, the UN Population Fund, USAID, GIZ and others) civil society organisations, academics, researchers, gender-based violence advocacy groups and government departments (including the Department of Women and the National Treasury.)

This is testament to the transparent nature of the process, and not the cloak-and-dagger style machinations Smout alludes to.

DM: On 11 November 2019, Shisana sent an email to SABCOHA asking it to respond on questions of clarity so that they could “finalise” the response on the GBVF. In that November email thread, Shisana suggested SABCOHA be part of the ISC, asked the board of SABCOHA whether they would be changing their name to reflect a GBVF focus, and to confirm that GBVF funds would be ring-fenced (ie, not included in SABCOHA’s existing community fund).

Based on the written response from Dr Rametsi (not included in the email thread) Shisana emailed them just a day later (12 November) stating:

“We are pleased to advise you that the interim steering committee on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide has agreed to appoint your good offices as a GBVF Fund Management Non-Profit Company.”

Shisana then asked them to develop the terms of reference based on documents she would supply and noted that “these documents should not be distributed beyond the people on this list. They are sent to you on a need to know basis.” On that list were just five people from the ISC – Shisana, Madumise-Pajibo, Sibongile Mthembu (Secretariat of the ISC, Total Shut Down), Shoki Tshabalala (acting DG of the department of women), and Esther Maluleke, (chief director of Governance, Justice, Transformation and Security in the department of women).

Only Shisana said anything in the exchange.

SABCOHA CEO Jikwana is the primary contact between the ISC and his organisation. On 13 November, Shisana wrote to SABCOHA acknowledging that they had confirmed acceptance of the responsibility to serve as the GBVF Fund coordinator and manager. The terms of reference, a special resolution, and implementation framework were only sent back to Shisana by Jikwana on 19 November. Yet, the ISC Co-Chair Report to the President for the week ending 15 November already indicated that:

“The steering committee has agreed to appoint SABCOHA to set up a Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Fund to receive private sector, donor, and Development Partner funds and disburse it to communities.”

In fact, the broader ISC had not made that decision. The decision was only communicated to members of the ISC via email on 20 November, with a request that they approve the TORs and implementation framework submitted by SABCOHA. Just two days later, on 22 November, Shisana again emailed the ISC stating that no response had been received, and thus they would be proceeding with SABCOHA, who would also receive electric BMWs for the ISC’s use.

The message seemed clear – the decision had been made, and it was the duty of the ISC to endorse it, not discuss it. On 25 November, a Treasury representative to the ISC raised concern about this rushed decision, stating:

“We have not run a fair competitive process for this, should this be the onus of the DoW [department of women] or Presidency? Normal SCM processes should ideally be followed or else we may be found wanting.”

The representative from Treasury declined to comment for this piece.

I asked Shisana in writing about the decision to appoint SABCOHA. She did not respond. Thus, I approached her in person on 17 February, after the Irish Embassy event mentioned above, to ask about the decision to appoint SABCOHA and how it had been made.

She was reluctant to talk to me, but did say that it was SABCOHA which had approached government, a suggestion that seems discordant with the interactions on the email thread. She wasn’t sure what the fuss was about.

“Who else should we have chosen?” she asked.

Given the potential size of the GBVF fund I asked whether SABCOHA would be earning an income for administering the fund. Shisana indicated that running a fund of this size would of course cost money, and thus SABCOHA would be getting a fee for administering it. Yet, when I asked about the tender process Shisana concluded our interview, suggesting that I had an ulterior motive for writing this piece.

“I know who you are, and who your friends are,” Shisana said. “You are part of a group that does not want to see change.” I sought clarity on who I was being grouped with, and what in fact she was saying. Shisana then began to list my former employers, as though they were the reason that I decided to write this article. When I indicated that in fact I was writing the piece as a freelance writer affiliated to no organisation at all, she said “If you write this piece, I could just as easily write one about you.” She then refused to respond to any further questions.

Repeating old mistakes

In the rush to seem responsive, the state has made the same mistakes it made almost a decade ago.

In 2012, the government attempted to set up a National Council on Gender Based Violence, led by the Department of Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities. It failed for various reasons, including that it was housed in the department and relied on their administrative capacity, it overstepped its mandate as a coordinating body, there was a lack of collaboration and cooperation between council stakeholders – particularly between government and civil society – and it failed to implement its own plan on gender-based violence.

Despite what seems like history repeating itself, the 2020 Budget allocates the department of women R15-million over the medium term to establish the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide.

RESPONSE: As per the recently approved NSP, a permanent Council on GBVF will be established. In the meantime, while awaiting legislation that is currently in draft, to establish the Council and its independence, the funds have been allocated to the ministry. In addition, a proper costing for the establishment of the council was completed and informs this allocation.

DM: And now a new development – a GBVF Fund to drive private and donor investment in programmes that solve the crisis. But with the government representative and the appointed administrators unable or unwilling to respond to simple questions on how the fund will be run, the fund is at risk.

The GBV summit declaration notes that:

“There is poor accountability across all sectors providing services to survivors of gender-based violence, particularly in the allocation and use of resources in order to address the breadth and depth of the crisis.”

Sadly, it seems that nothing has changed.

RESPONSE: The Committee is acutely aware of the reality that there has in the past been poor accountability when it comes to the allocation and management of resources to fight gender-based violence; an acknowledgement your correspondent makes herself in quoting from the summit declaration. As a result, we have been intentional in ensuring that all matters relating to the management of resources follow the necessary processes of consultation, as well to comply with the necessary financial and regulatory prescripts. In fact, no services have been procured directly by the steering committee throughout its existence.

Furthermore, with an ISC that is representative of constituents, the expectation is that members report back to their respective constituents and relevant government departments reporting through their respective parliamentary committees in addition to the press statements issued through GCIS.

Therefore is not based on facts as has been noted above, but rather arguments are based on speculative innuendos that are influenced by resistance to the disruption of the hegemony that has been accepted as most “qualified” responders to GBVF in this country at the expense of black women’s voices and bodies. In fact, maintaining the status quo of this hegemony in this space would be to ignore the fact that we are here because and ONLY BECAUSE, a group of womxn, led by radical black feminists, under the intersectional movement of #TheTotalShutdown brought the nation to this point. DM